I know Bill Caldwell. Worked for him. He convinced me, unintentionally I’m sure, to leave the Army. I know nothing about what he did, didn’t, should, or shouldn’t have done with all this stuff in the paper. But my personal opinion, FWIW, is that he’s not above suspicion and should not get the benefit of the doubt.

Shit, Rick, I do illegal searches all the time.

I debated on posting this, but there are people I know who are solidly upstanding, courageous men, full of character and good hearts. They have been in actual harm’s way for longer than I was even in the peacetime Army. Those men deserve our support and gratitude every day.

At the 3-star general level, maybe it’s no longer about moral courage, character, and choosing the hard right over the easy wrong; maybe it’s about politics just like it is when a congressman posts on Craigslist: you screw up and get caught, you’re out.

Sometimes, life is too fatalistic for my tastes. It’s a fundamentally anti-American thing to say that we are too molded by the past, that our destinies are rough-hewn before we have control of our own lives. Sad, too, to learn too late that this is also true of those around us.

Certainly, this isn’t determinism; but without even knowing what causes us to shape and shade our thinking, how much are we hamstrung by invisible ropes? I thought briefly that perhaps I should never read research again, but my feeling here are they same as they are with consumer DNA testing: learning where the risks are gives us power to choose.

I saw a posting today for an inhouse commercial counsel at Verizon Wireless. This would be an interesting job, lots of commercial contracts, some domain specificity, and it’s not terribly far from home.

But I started filling out the online application (again asking for username and password — really? Why does my password to the job application webapp require at least one letter and number? Am I in danger of being hacked and losing all my data?) and got very quickly turned off. I filled out my address (since most such webapps are really just private label versions of third-party software, I assume that the software would later be able to read my resume and guess at my address — why make me type it at all upfront?). But there was an additional field asking how long I’d lived at that address. Okay, whatever, 1-2 years (I think I moved about 18 months ago).

And then a new field pops up — it asks me for SEVEN years of address history. WTF? I’ve never been asked about that length of time for where I’ve lived that didn’t involve a specific moral character inquiry (namely the three state bar exams I’ve taken) or a security clearance (entering the Army and becoming an officer with my old SECRET clearance).

Why the heck would they care about this? It sounds like a scheme to track down people who might owe them money but nevertheless are applying for jobs there. This theory reminds me, now that I think of it, of an article I read recently about Target/Wal-Mart finding that some large percentage, 10-20%, of job applicants had been tossed out of the store for shoplifting or similar problems — maybe Verizon’s on to something. I just know that I don’t want any part of it.